Donald Trump and the 'mean tweets' canard

It's so, so much more.

Last night, I posted a tweet thread. It was a shortened version of the piece I wrote in this space yesterday — detailing the surprising (to me, at least) numbers in a New York Times/Siena College poll that suggest that a whole bunch of people are nostalgic for the good old days of the Trump presidency.

Conservative Twitter latched onto my tweets as evidence that liberals really don’t get it — or something. (To be clear: I absolutely do not consider myself a liberal.) It was actually illuminating.

One strand of the pro-Trump argument — as elucidated in these tweets — really stood out to me. This response from someone named Mark Jeffrey (he has more than 50K followers and appears to be deep into crypto) is indicative of it:

It’s an echo of an argument long made by Donald Trump Jr. — most recently just a few days ago:

(“Stoped.”)

The essence of the argument goes something like this: Sure, Donald Trump may have sent some mean tweets during his presidency. But, he also kept the country safe. And did a great job with the economy. And generally kicked ass.

If only liberals (and the media) didn’t get so agitated about tweets they would have seen that Trump was a great president. And that Joe Biden is a total disaster — even if his Twitter feed is more “presidential.”

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This is, of course, a red herring argument. It takes as a given that the worst of Trump’s presidency was the fact that he sent some mean tweets. But, of course, he did a whole hell of a lot more.

A brief list:

• Attempted to overthrow the 2020 election using the powers of the presidency

• Incited a riot at the U.S. Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes

• Botched the handling of a global pandemic

• Blamed “both sides” for the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville in 2017

• Put a policy in place that separated children from their families at the border

• Made 30,000+ false and misleading statements

• Instituted a Muslim ban

• Politicized the Justice Department

All of those things — and many more — had direct impacts on not just the way we view the presidency but the way we view ourselves and the notion of what it means to be an American.

In several cases, Trump’s decision-making cost lives. Or made lives much, much more difficult.

Which is what drives me nuts about the “mean tweets” argument. It’s a blatant attempt to downplay what Trump actually did in office. To suggest that, really, this is all just people overreacting to some tweets. And that, maybe, if people weren’t so damn sensitive, they would realize all the good Trump was doing.

That simplification badly — and I mean BADLY — misses the point.

Now, a word on Biden. I DO think that his policies (or lack thereof) on the border have been a massive fail. And there’s no question we are now living in a deeply riven world — with conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East still raging. (I am not sure that Biden is as much to blame for it as conservatives would suggest but nonetheless it is happening while he is in office.) And, yes, inflation is still too high!

In short: None of the above is to excuse the policy decisions Biden has made. He will be judged on them in the coming election.

But, to suggest that the Trump presidency was a series of successes punctuated, occasionally, by a mean tweet or two? Nah, bro. I was there. I lived through it. And I remember it was much, much more than some tweets.